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We sing songs about birds. They can’t understand them. There’s a song about us we can’t understand. Some of us hear it. To each it’s a different song and a different singer. I hear a bird that can’t sing. I hear the raven.
Josephine Littletree, a mixed-race aboriginal, grows up in British Columbia in the 1930s. At a residential school priests and nuns try to kill the Indian in her. She escapes and lives for years in her people’s hunting grounds but when she leaves faces prejudice again from white society. Her early relationships fall victim to it. Sometimes it’s a wild ride through a world of bootlegging, battering, prostitutes, bank robbery and the paranormal. Overcoming her addiction to alcohol, she takes her grandmother’s advice and gathers together the myths of her people in a book and becomes a storyteller. During World War II she meets a white man who falls in love with her. She lives with him in his shack on the waterfront. They are both outsiders, but with a difference that dooms their relationship. Returning to her reserve to take care of her sick grandmother, she contracts tuberculosis and retuses to see him any more. His letters go unanswered. In a sanatorium she meets with prejudice for the last time. In a final gesture of defiance and accetptance she goes back to her reserve. She writes about her life with acid humour, bitterness and regret. When the love between and man and a woman isn’t equal, there’s a reason. The man she rejects has chosen to be an outsider. She was born one.
